Spring Equinox

Spring Equinox is a time of balance. Darkness and daylight get their equal time, the seasons shift from winter into spring, and things reach an equilibrium between extremes. Just when you’re surveying the landscape and thinking things look rough, a bud starts to pop out here, or a flower is suddenly blooming over there, and you notice birds singing in the trees where all had been quiet and still. A garden takes shape and rises up out of the mud where there was nothing to see but possibility. This is the time of year when everything is pretty much cleaned up and ready on the homestead. The fruit trees are pruned, blackberries are cut back, the leaf mulch covering the garden has disintegrated with weather and chicken scratchings, the garden beds are mostly weeded, and we wait. The waiting and working go hand in hand, and there will be plenty of tilling, mulching, planting and watering soon enough, but for now we watch things shift to spring.

 

Spring Equinox is when we start to notice the beautiful things that catch our eye, like the blossoms on the peach tree, or the sunny yellow daffodils that were planted in the fall, but it’s a good practice to look around and notice the blank spaces of possibility waiting to take shape with the oncoming season. The thing we often forget is that’s where the richness is.

The beautiful, lush patch of nettles did not get to be that way on their own. They are thriving and verdant unlike all the other patches of nettle I tried to establish around our homestead because they are growing out of the edges of the compost. All that chicken manure, rotten fruit, ash from the woodstove, coffee grounds, potato peels, and miscellaneous garbage like the occasional takeout containers from the sushi burrito stand; they have all become gorgeous green stinging nettles.

At this point the garden doesn’t look like anything but a patch of mud and a great hangout spot for chickens, but in a few weeks things will be taking shape for a garden to rise up out of that mud and manure. It’s always good to remind ourselves that no matter how cold, wet, muddy, bleak, or barren things might become in our lives or in the world around us, there will always be a shift.  The land doesn’t question whether or not it’s all going to change and grow, and that spring will be coming back around again, and we can take a lesson there and believe in that process too. Right now, I’m happy to get my hands dirty and be an active part of the changes going on out there.